Aftertime

room.

“They’ve started gathering here in the afternoon. Waiting…” Smoke sighed, running his hands through his hair. For a moment he looked a decade older than the thirty-five Cass had taken him for. “Sometimes a dozen of them. They wander off when the sun starts to get low. For now, anyway.”

The Beaters had everyone’s attention. The argument between Sammi and her mother was forgotten. Cass took the opportunity to slip out of the room, Smoke following her without a word. She could not stay there, watching the Beaters, enduring the scrutiny of all those people.

She would wait in the office, alone, until evening. After all, she’d become accustomed to her own company.

Cass added it up in her head. A hundred seventy-five, maybe two hundred people left, between the library and the school and firehouse… Silva’s population had been over four thousand before the famine and the riots and the suicides and the fever deaths. Before the Beaters began carrying the survivors away.

As the sun sank down in the sky, Cass felt restless. She had been alone in the office for hours, waiting for night to come. No one had disturbed her. No one had even walked by the door. She stood up and stretched, easing her hip and thigh muscles. They were tight all the time now, from the walking.

When she regained consciousness all those days ago, she saw the Sierra foothills in the distance, the flat dry central valley all around her. She had been lying under a stand of creosote a few yards from the edge of a farm road, one she didn’t know. All those years living in Silva, ever since Mim and Byrn had moved there during Cass’s senior year of high school, she had never traveled far from the long, flat, straight stretch of Highway 161 that led up into the hills from the central valley. The few times she’d made the four-hour trip to San Francisco with friends, to see a concert or spend the night on someone’s friend’s couch getting high and drinking cheap wine, she’d barely noticed the chicken and cattle ranches flanking the highway, the clots of houses that passed for towns, the collapsing sheds and silos left over from more prosperous times.

She had been lying in a thicket of dead brown weeds. Kaysev had taken root in patches between the dead plants, and Cass had been curled up with her face in a soft clump, its gingery scent in her nostrils along with the other smells: the metal tang of crusted blood, the rotting spoils of her own breath, her body’s odor foul and acrid. Her mind had been clouded and troubled, both racing and stalled, somehow. She had no idea how she’d come to be lying, bruised and mangled, in the weeds, and she wondered if she was dead, because her last memory was praying for death when the Beaters closed their ruined fingers around her arms.

That was all she remembered, and it came to her through a dense tangle of lost and broken thoughts, so she understood that time had passed since that terrible moment. How much time, she had no idea.

The brown weeds made a stark pattern against the clear sky and Cass had wished she could just close her eyes and finish the job of dying.

But then she saw what had become of her flesh.

Stretching made the wounds on her back throb, and Cass pulled her shirt up and over her shoulders to let the room’s cool air reach them. Just for a moment, just to take away the constant ache for a little while. She leaned into the stretch, and tried not to think. Only to wait, for Smoke to come and get her and take her to what was next.

A sound at the door broke her concentration. Cass pulled her shirt down hastily, but it was too late.

It was the girl. Sammi. She had approached the room so quietly.

And she had seen.

06

FOR A LONG MOMENT THEY STARED AT EACH other, Cass holding her breath, the girl’s eyes wide with surprise and curiosity-but no fear.

“Can I come in?”

“Of course,” Cass said.

The girl slipped gracefully into a chair at the same table where Cass had drunk coffee hours earlier. She had washed and changed her clothes, and her hair had been combed and plaited neatly. The braids made her look even younger, but Cass could see that she was well into adolescence, maybe fourteen. That might explain her rebellion against her mother, but Cass figured it went further than that-there was a reckless spirit to her. A spirit not so different from her own.

“So you really were attacked by Beaters,” the girl said. “What happened?”

Cass winced. Telling Smoke had been hard enough, especially when he asked to see her scars. The look on his face-the horror, the pity-had been almost more than she could bear, but it was worse when he turned away from her. It had taken him a few minutes to get his composure back, and he’d remained cool and distant even when he promised to keep her secret.

“I was…” Cass started to speak, found that her mouth was too dry. She licked her lips and cleared her throat, wished for water. “I was taken, yes. But, I, I woke up and I was…all right.”

Sammi didn’t hide her skepticism. “What about those cuts? Did one of them do that to you or did you do it to yourself?”

Cass had wondered the same thing a thousand times. The wound pattern held clues. The damage was all in places she could reach by herself, and it was safe to say she was the one who’d bitten and chewed herself.

The wounds on her back were another matter. The Beaters always started with a person’s back, where the large uninterrupted stretch of flesh made their ravenous feeding easiest. Only after they chewed it away did they move to the backs of the legs, the buttocks-and eventually, when they had eaten away all they could, they turned their victim over and started on the front.

She touched her stubbled hair. “I did this.”

“So, you were one, for a while at least,” Sammi said. “It’s the only thing that makes sense. Did you eat the blueleaf?”

Cass shook her head, but who could say with certainty? When the government dropped kaysev from planes all over the nation, its last act before it ceased to exist, the second strain had somehow gotten mixed in. Everyone had a theory about that: most thought the researchers made some sort of mistake, sending the wrong seed, but some people thought blueleaf had evolved on its own, that mutating cells had been heeding nothing more than the call of evolution. And some saw the hand of God in the appearance of the rogue leaves, whose edges were slightly pocked and tinged faintly blue- His punishment for the profligacy and faithlessness of the last decade.

The blueleaf took root, an occasional low-growing and stunted patch among the healthy kaysev. At first no one noticed. By the time anyone made the connection, it was too late for the first wave of the infected.

Detection wasn’t the only problem. The early stage of the disease didn’t hint at what the victim would ultimately become-it hid its curse in a cloak of sensual delirium.

First came the fever, of course-and that felled thirty percent of the infected, mostly the very young and the old. But if you survived that, you felt so fucking good. Word quickly spread that when the fever leveled off, you experienced a high not unlike ecstasy. Your skin pigmentation deepened, an appealing effect when coupled with the feverish sheen. The irises of your eyes intensified-green turned jade, blue shone brilliant sapphire, brown sparked gold-but your pupils stopped dilating, and without bright light you could barely see.

You ceased to care, as your mind started to take elaborate journeys on its own. The hallucinations were elaborate and often sexual. There were no terrors or suicidal impulses. You simply lay about, flushed and beautiful, sighing with pleasure.

For a week or two. Until you started to pick at your skin and pull at your hair. Until your confusion deepened and your speech grew unintelligible, and your blood burned hot and you flayed your own skin and developed a taste for uninfected flesh.

Cass had spotted a few blueleaf plants here and there as she followed the road up into the foothills. Citizens learned to kill the plant on sight, and they’d managed to drive the wretched thing nearly to extinction only a few months after they first appeared. Cass herself pulled the plants from the ground and trampled them whenever she saw them, even though her body had somehow rebuffed the disease.

“My mom says blueleaf’s only here. That it’s not in the rest of the country.”